Sunday, 11 March 2012

With this, it proclaims its ability to transform experience into tradition. Proverbs cannot be applied to situations. Instead, they have a kind of magical character: they transform the situation. It is scarcely within the powers of the individual to purify the lessons of his life completely by purging them of his particular experience. But the proverb can do this by taking possession of them.

It turns the lesson that has been experienced into a wave in the living chain of innumerable lessons that flow down from eternity.

In fact, one might go on and ask oneself whether the relationship of the storyteller to his material, human life, is not in itself a craftsman's relationship -- whether it is not his very task to fashion the raw material of experience, his own and that of others, in a solid, useful, and unique way. It is a kind of procedure which may perhaps most adequately be exemplified by the proverb, if one thinks of this as an ideogram of a story. A proverb, one might say, is a ruin which stands on the site of an old story and in which a moral twines about a happening like ivy around a wall.

Walter Benjamin: The Storyteller, first published in Orient and Occident, October 1936, translated by Harry Zohn in Selected Writings, vol. 3, eds. Michael W. Jennings and Howard Eiland, 2002

The point of view might be phrased in this way: Proverbs are strategies for dealing with situations. In so far as situations are typical and recurrent in a given social structure, people develop names for them and strategies for handling them. Another name for strategies might be attitudes.

A work like Madame Bovary (or its homely American translation, Babbitt) is the strategic naming of a situation. It singles out a pattern of experience that is sufficiently representative of our social structure, that recurs sufficiently often mutandis mutatis, for people to ‘need a word for it’ and to adopt an attitude towards it. Each work of art is the addition of a word to an informal dictionary.

Art forms like ‘tragedy’ or ‘comedy’ or ‘satire’ would be treated as equipments for living, that size up situations in various ways and in keeping with correspondingly various attitudes.

Kenneth Burke, Literature as Equipment for Living, 1938 in The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action, 1941

(left) To pull to get the longest end (center) Love is on the side where the money bag hangs (lower left) He who has spilt his porridge cannot scrape it all up again(right) To barely be able to reach from one loaf to the other(on table) A hoe without a handle(under table) To look for the hatchet / Here he is with his lantern

To even be able to tie the devil to a pillow

To be a pillar-biter

To bang one's head against a brick wall

One foot shod, the other bare

To bell the cat / To be armed to the teeth / To put your armor on

To fry the whole herring for the sake of the roe / To get the lid on the head

To sit between two stools in the ashes

To be a hen feeler

It depends on the fall of the cards

The world is turned upside down

Leave at least one egg in the nest

To lead each other by the nose

The die is cast

To look through one's fingers

To marry under the broomstick

To have the roof tiled with tarts

To shoot a second bolt to find the first

The roof has lathes

To have a toothache behind the ears /To be pissing against the moon / Here hangs the pot

To shave the fool without lather / Two fools under one hood

It grows out of the window

To play on the pillory

Where the gate is open the pigs will run into the corn / Where the corn decreases the pig increases

To run like one's backside is on fire / He who eats fire craps sparks

To toss feathers in the wind

To gaze at the stork

To want to kill two flies with one stroke

To fall from the ox onto the rear end of the ass

To kiss the ring of the door / To wipe one's backside on the door

To fish behind the net

Big fish eat little fish

To be unable to see the sun shine on the water

It hangs like a privy over a ditch / They both crap in the same hole

To throw one's money into the water

A wall with cracks will soon collapse

To not care whose house is on fire as long as one can warm oneself at the blaze

To drag the block

Fear makes the old woman trot

Horse droppings are not figs

If the blind lead the blind both will fall into the ditch

The journey is not yet over when one can discern the church and the steeple

Everything, however finely spun, finally comes to the sun

To keep one's eye on the sail

To crap on the gallows

Who knows why geese go barefoot?

To see bears dancing / Wild bears prefer each other's company

To throw one's cowl over the fence

It is ill to swim against the stream

The pitcher goes to the water until it finally breaks / The broadest straps are cut from someone else's leather

One returns to Bruegel's ingenious study of human stupidity armed with centuries of reiterated supporting proof: human folly is inexhaustible.

Historical developments merely compound the evidence.

We're reminded of a contemporary proverb: the devil is in the details.

Here, indeed, he is situated smack dab in the middle of the wonderfully superabundant detail, comfortably ensconced in his gazebo/confessional.

The blank expressions on the faces of the players in this comedy of the absurd help us recall that the relationship of the individual to society in a Flemish village is perhaps not so unlike that which pertains in our own world of alienated monads after all.